Question

A software team of 40 engineers currently develops a set of loosely related microservices in a single Git repository. They practice long-lived feature branches that live for weeks, and they frequently experience painful merge conflicts and integration failures discovered only at release time, once per quarter. Leadership wants to reduce integration risk and enable more frequent, safer releases. As the cloud architect advising on the development process, which change to their source-control and integration process should you recommend?

Accepted Answer

Adopt trunk-based development with short-lived branches merged to main at least daily, protected by automated CI that runs on every merge, with releases decoupled via feature flags.

Answer

Split the monorepo into 40 separate repositories, one per engineer, so each person owns their own integration timeline and avoids conflicts.

Answer

Keep long-lived feature branches but add a manual weekly merge-review meeting where senior engineers resolve accumulated conflicts together.

Answer

Freeze all merges for the two weeks before each quarterly release so the codebase stabilizes before integration testing begins.